We always go back to talk about gamedev crunch without talking about its history. There is a history.
Back in the 80s when I was a kid trying to put my hands on magazines with pictures of game machines, Japanese game developers were working hard. Extremely hard. We’re talking months at work. People would not go back home (what’s the point when you finish working at 2am?). Meanwhile I was playing European and American games and all I could see was that they were so often vastly inferior in their polish.
A lot of my friends and people around that time started to fetish Japan but all I could think was HOW. How are they so much better, the attention to detail, the gameplay, the screen title everything demonstrated that Japanese game developers were serious about computer games.
The answer is clear now: they were simply killing themselves –literally- making those games. Outside technical reasons (Japanese machines had more game-dedicated hardware) the reason Japanese games were more fluid, more beautiful, had the best ideas and best designs was simply that those teams crunched and crunched and crunched until there was no bugs left, until the game felt right. I kind of knew that, but didn’t think it would be at that scale: apparently it was just the norm. There’s some sadness in that but also those designers and engineers didn’t quit. If you quit it won’t happen.
And yes, we all still do crunch regularly. For every game made someone or a full team is going to give everything they have at some point. Technology and tools are a thousand times better and easier than the 80s ones but we still crunch because we have a billion times more things to put in one game. Game developers have never been really able to catch up with what people want. People want more, all the time. And we game developers, always want the game to be what it should be.
Which is why IMO there’s no debate to have about crunch, it is not a matter of good or bad: even with seasoned professionals and money it just happens when you make complex things. Even a tiny bit. No one cares that rocket engineers crunch to send a satellite up in space or that smartphones engineers have to churn out a new, superior phone every 10 months and that for that to happen, they probably will not sleep enough or enjoy some family time. We don’t value Play and Games as much as we value getting a new phone or more DirecTV so crunching is bad. Yet people want 200hrs of awesome gameplay.
The only solution is for all of us to hold up and slow down our progress but yeah, won’t happen. Or WILL IT